Balancing Responsibilities: Being a Great Mentor
As a researcher in your first-ever faculty position, you have recruited the people for your new laboratory: a skilled technician, a promising postdoctoral fellow, your first graduate student. Now you are wondering, how do I balance encouraging these individuals to be creative and independent with getting the results I need for the projects outlined in my grant proposal?
At first blush, the roles of a productive scientist and a good mentor may seem to pull you in opposing directions. However, with a few tricks shared by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s panel of researchers from the career development meeting this past July, a young investigator can learn to effectively balance these responsibilities.
First, it’s important to keep in mind that your grant proposal is a plan, not a contract.
"You’ve laid out your research program, usually a five-year plan for the National Institutes of Health," says Margaret Hostetter, M.D., the Jean McLean Wallace Professor of Pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine and co-chair of BWF’s Career Awards for Medical Scientists program advisory committee. "But while you may have specific aims that you need to keep in mind, it’s important to be open to the natural discovery process of science--even if it leads you down a path different from the one you originally described."
With this understanding, you can allow invention and imagination to occur at the bench, Dr. Hostetter said. Being innovative in the design of experiments and bringing in new or better techniques are ways to encourage creativity and development in your students while addressing your specific aims.
Getting the graduate students you need to “sign on” to your project will be less challenging if you can identify those who are most likely to be excited about your work, says George Langford, Ph.D., the dean of natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a member of BWF’s Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences program advisory committee.
“One way to really get students excited in the laboratory is to include them as part of an important project and shape the project in a way that enables them to finish it in a reasonable amount of time,” Dr. Langford said.
Martin Matzuk, the Stuart A. Wallace Professor of Pathology at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-chair of BWF’s Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences program advisory committee, has successfully helped his two most recent graduate students finish their degree programs in under four years.
“Part of the trick is giving them two projects at the beginning--one a long-range Ph.D.-quality project that you don’t know if it’s going to work; the other more of a tool-maker, master’s degree-type project,” Dr. Matzuk said. Giving them this second project that you can “almost guarantee” they are going to figure out enables the students to learn the art of completing projects.
“You also have a responsibility to help your students graduate with publications so they are prepared to move on to positions as postdocs or other wonderful opportunities,” adds Suzanne Pfeffer, Ph.D., a professor and chair of biochemistry at Stanford University and a member of BWF’s Interfaces in Science advisory committee. Because time is an issue for them, Dr. Pfeffer said, your job may also include learning to tell them when to stop a project.
In all, no small order has landed on your plate. Which may well leave you wondering how to balance the responsibilities of mentorship and the expected levels of productivity from graduate students and postdocs
Dr. Hostetter highlights the need to provide both formal and informal mentoring. Formal mentoring includes using lab meetings to keep track of what’s going on.
“Have everybody present his or her work at every meeting, so you have a pretty good handle formally on where everyone is and you don’t have a six-week lapse before hearing from a graduate student that things aren’t going well,” she recommended.
Another approach used by Louis Muglia, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pediatrics and director of the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes at Washington University, is setting up time to meet with each person individually for one hour every week. “Even if I don’t see them everyday, this way they know I will be available for them to go over any problems. I think knowing that you are there to listen to them is extremely important to their progress,” says Dr. Muglia, who is a member of BWF’s Career Awards for Medical Scientists program advisory committee.
The second approach--informal mentoring--involves infusing your own work ethic into your lab, while keeping the lines of communication open at all times. For example, as Dr. Matzuk says, if your actions help ensure that at least one other person in the lab--student, postdoc, or technician--works really hard, that inspires others in the lab to work hard, too.
“If one student comes in on weekends, it raises the expectation that others will also come in on weekends,” he said.
For young investigators who may not be excited by the promise of more responsibility and even more administrative tasks to manage, Dr. Matzuk suggests that you stay in touch with the actual techniques and experiments in your laboratory as a way to boost productivity.
“Even though I’ve been out of my postdoc for 13 years now, I’m still in the lab doing tissue culture, taking care of mice, and doing transfections,” he said. “This is one way to interact closely with students, postdocs, and technicians--and to stay in touch with the reasons why I liked science in the first place.”
When it comes to recruiting graduate students, BWF’s experts say the good news is that as a new faculty member, you have an automatic advantage--students seem to want to work with the newest professor. They see this as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor and make a significant contribution. Other tricks to effectively recruiting great students include volunteering to be on the institution’s admission’s committee, teaching first-year courses, and having undergraduate students in your lab who can rave about how much they like working there.
